**1) African women believe that Western involvement only hurts their own efforts towards obtaining more rights** 
**__Yale Journal of Public Health__**, Vol. 1, No. 2, 20**__04__**, “Cut Off.” http://www.yaleph.com/archive/vol1no2/story7.html 
Outside Sudan and the other countries where it is practiced, female genital cutting has drawn the attention of women across the globe, many of whom have joined movements to abolish it. Aside from moral debate__,__ __a controversy surrounds whose role it is to speak out against FGC: is it a question for African women? For all Africans? All women? All people__?
Most international assistance agencies have developed policies or programs to combat female genital cutting, and according to the WHO there is a "Western feminist tendency to see Female Genital Mutilation...as the gender oppression to end all oppressions." In a 1998 World Health Report, the WHO argued for complete eradication. Its resolution stated that "FGM is a deeply rooted, traditional practice. However, it is a form of violence against girls and women that has serious physical and psychological consequences which adversely affect health. Furthermore, it is a reflection of discrimination against women and girls." The WHO explains its intervention through its belief in universal human rights and its disapproval of the notion that cultural relativism justifies acts of sex-based violence. However, others have challenged the WHO's view. According to anthropologist Ellen Gruenbaum: "__If these values are based on deeply held cultural values and traditions, can outsiders effectively challenge them without challenging the cultural integrity of the people who practice them?"
Many__ Sudanese __women find the way in which Western women contribute to the anti-FGC movement to be offensive and counter-productive to their own efforts to eradicate the practice. They accuse Western women of failing to acknowledge the agency of African women by implying that they cannot speak for themselves. Also, Africans accuse Western women of sensationalizing FGC and in so doing creating a defensive reaction among practitioners who might otherwise be allies in the process of eradication.
Also, some African women feel betrayed by the single-minded focus on FGC exhibited by Western women as well as by some African scholars. While genital cutting has received significant attention around the world, other issues that significantly affect women's lives are ignored.__ Henry Louis Gates, the seminal scholar of African-American studies, wonders: "__Is it, after all, unreasonable to be suspicious of Westerners who are exercised over female circumcision, but whose eyes glaze over when the same women are merely facing starvation?"__ Critics like Gates point out that action may seem misguided when it is based on sensationalism and ignores those needs which are greatest. As Ellen Gruenbaum articulates, "__Instead of concern for the basic needs for Third World Women, like water supply, economic development, and peace, Western feminists are more concerned about veils, clitorises, and so on. What good is all this without our lives?"
Others resent what they see as Western cultural hypocrisy__. Nahid Toubia, __an Egyptian feminist, argues that "the thinking of an African woman who believes FGM is the fashionable thing to do to become a real woman is not so different from that of an American woman who has breast implants to feel more feminine." Women all over the world alter their physical appearances in a variety of ways, and yet FGC is uniquely characterized as barbaric and inhumane__.  

**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**2)** **US** **assumptions of FGC are demeaning to the women who undergo the practice** 
Rosemarie **__Skaing__,** 20**__05__**, MA Sociology from University of Ioaw, “Female Genital Mutilation,” p. 98-99. 

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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**3) Seeing a Monolithic image of third world women destroys the unity needed for a cross-cultural feminist movement**
Sunera **__Thobani__** (Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on globalization, nation-building, citizenship, migration, race, and gender relations. Dr. Thobani is also past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canada's largest feminist organization. The first woman of color to serve in this position, Dr. Thobani's tenure was committed to making the politics of anti-racism central to the women's movement.” Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity” http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v020/20.3thobani.html) 20**__05__**. 
The publication of Chandra Talpade Mohanty's germinal essay, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," made her a much admired and respected scholar, deeply influencing the thinking of many feminists, including myself. The essay, which quickly became part of the Women's Studies canon, is reprinted in Mohanty's latest book, //Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity//.In this book, __Mohanty identifies__ three "__problematic directions within U.S.-based feminisms__." __The first is the growing, largely class-based rift between activist feminism and university-based feminist theorizing__, the latter being susceptible to careerism and a narrow professionalism. __The second is the deepening of consumerist and corporatist values, fuelling a rise of "neo-liberal"__ and "free market" __feminism, concerned only with "women's advancement up the corporate and nation-state ladder.__" Last is the "narrowing of feminist politics and theory," which she defines to be a result of the "critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodern skepticism about identity" (6). Mohanty argues the case for a materialist analysis that addresses issues of identity, agency, community, home, and nation within the context of the institutions of the global political economy. Divided into three sections, the book addresses the major themes that have consistently occupied Mohanty's writings: decolonizing feminism; demystifying capitalism; and reorienting feminism. **[End Page 221]** The first section of the book, "Decolonizing Feminism," is vintage Mohanty. Her critique of the textual strategies deployed by Western feminists in cross-cultural studies to construct a __[the]monolithic image of third world women as always and everywhere victimized, unrelentingly oppressed by "their" patriarchal cultures, remains as pertinent today__ as when she first wrote her classic essay. The textual strategies she identified at that time included the assumption that the category of 'woman' is a discrete, unitary formation, constituted prior to women's entry into social relations and institutions, such as the family; and __the uncritical use of descriptive generalizations and disjointed examples as "proof" of the universality of the oppression of women in all Third World societies__. The __result__ of such __[in] flawed analytic and methodological approaches__ distort the understanding of the various types of agency of Third World women, particularly the forms of resistance they develop, __and thwarts the potential for cross-cultural feminist alliances__. Simultaneously, Western feminists constitute themselves as active agents of history—liberated, educated and free—//through// the object status they impose upon their downtrodden "sisters." Mohanty argues that __the power exercised through such constructs is not unlike that exercised by other Western colonialist discourses.__ Unfortunately, the book does not carry this analysis forward to examine the current situation of Muslim women (in Muslim and non-Muslim societies) in the midst of the aggressively militarist empire-building of the U.S. regime in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The ubiquity of the image of Muslim women as desperately in need of rescue by the "West" reveals how strong are the current forces that antiracist feminists have to contend with in the United States as elsewhere. 


**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**4) Global feminism is an impossibility- the capitalist structure; social economic and racial stratifications prevent** 
[[image:file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/serrann/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image004.gif width="575" height="180"]]Eryn **__Scott__**, 20**__02__**, Gender Studies Professor at Columbia, “Differences and Intesections Between Feminism.”  












**5) African women perceive western feminists and confrontational and empirically resist** 
[[image:file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/serrann/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image005.gif width="492" height="251" align="center"]]Mary **__Nvangweso__**. September 20**__02__**, master degree in theology, “Salvific message and the Nandi ritual of female circumcision.”
**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**6) The reason African women are subjugated, or viewed in a lowly matter, is because of Western policies like the plan.** 
Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development 
(MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us 

This incident is a telling one, highlighting the maternalistic nature of the relationship 
between colonizer and colonized. The history of British colonial rule in northern Sudan is 
marked by conflicts over the practice: “policing women directly and indirectly through 
kinsmen, chiefs and clerics…occupied centre stage in colonial legislative agendas” 
(ibid.). Anne McClintock (1995) argues that women and men did not experience 
imperialism in the same way, and that gender distinctions mattered in the confrontation 
with colonialism. __Within pre-colonial power hierarchies, women enjoyed significant__ 
__leverage over ritual and the fact that women rather than men determined whether a girl__ 
__was circumcised was very threatening to the British sense of gender order (Abusharaf,__ 
__2006). The British insertion of colonial authority figures within family and community__ 
__networks thus served to remove power and control from women and actually reinforce__ 
__male dominance in Sudanese society. Far from being a ‘civilizing’ or ‘liberating’__ 
__influence on women’s lives, these policies were enacted with the view of regulating their__ 
__behaviour and restricting their freedoms:__ 
In areas where women’s subordination was clear, the British did not interfere to 
improve them, while in other situations where women shared equal status with 
men, they lost this status under the pretext of civilisation. In this the colonial male 
bourgeois mentality played an important role. Abusharaf (2000:157) 
Veena Das (1997) asserts that __by appropriating the bodies of women as objects on which__ 
__the desires of nationalism can be inscribed, women become a microcosm of the nation__. 
From a colonialist standpoint, women’s power needed to be circumscribed and their 
bodies governed, in order to inscribe colonial rule. 
Thus it can be argued that __current debates surrounding FGC in__ __Africa__ __must be viewed__ 
__within recent historical perspectives of colonizers and colonized__. Lane and Rubinstine 
(1996:37) argue that “__where the residue…of colonial privilege may contribute to a__ 
__Western intervenor’s expectation that her actions will be viewed as appropriate and__ 
__authoritative, former colonial subjects may take precisely the opposite view”. It is clear__ 
__that the necessity exists to take account of contemporary and historical relationships of__ 
__power and privilege as essential first steps toward arriving at a sensitive and nuanced__ 
__approach to the issue.__ 

**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**7) Feminist framing of FGC excuses economic exploitation and detracts focus from other key issues** 
Rosmarie **__Skaine__**, Sociologist, MA from UNIowa, 20**__05__**, __Female Genital Mutilation: Legal, Cultural & Medical Issues,__ page 96. 


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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**8) Women gain more power after going through FGC- the plan puts a stop to this** 
Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development 
(MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us 

Boddy notes that in the Sudanese context of complete polarization of the sexes, the 
procedure of FGC renders a girl marriageable, and that undergoing it is a “necessary 
condition of becoming a woman”, arguing that women are not so much preventing their 
own sexual pleasure, as “enhancing their femininity” (ibid.). ‘__Circumcision’ is believed__ 
__to endow women with a remarkable ability to exercise self-control and power, to display__ 
__restraint over their sexuality. Self-mastery is seen as a virtue and controlled sexuality__ 
__allows women to “drive hard bargains and have a say in household politics and decision-__ 
__making processes__” (Abusharaf, 2001:129). __The act of ‘circumcision’ allows women to__ 
__exercise power not only over their sexuality, but also over their spouses__ (ibid.). __However__ 
__controversial they may be in the West, it is nonetheless critical that notions of women__ 
__using ‘circumcision’ as a form of gender identification, cultural transmission and power__ 
__be considered in any analysis of the practice, in order to challenge the image of the__ 
__circumcised woman as a subjugated victim of male dominance.__ 



**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**9) The state’s construal of violence and selective intervention entrench the ideology of a woman’s “need for protection”** 
Spike V. **__Peteeson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States: Feminist Visions of International Relations Theory, p. 46. [Bhattacharjee. 

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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**10) The state is the largest organizer of patriarchy-eradication of FGC can’t solve** 
Spike V. **__Peteeson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States: Feminist Visions of International Relations Theory, p. 45. 

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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**11) Feminist discourse surrounding FGC is victimizing and oppressive** 
Karen **__Musalo__**, prof at Univ of Cali and Director of Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Winter 20**__07__**, lexis. [Bhattacharjee] 

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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**12) Western nations enact policies like the plan with colonialist undertones, and fail to realize that FGC empowers women** 
Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development 
(MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us 

__Perspectives such as that of Hosken maintain that circumcised women can feel no__ 
__pleasure – a view which may be due to notions of the clitoris as the ‘seat’ of sexual__ 
__pleasure in a woman. This view fails to take into account the numerous testimonies from__ 
__circumcised women that they__ achieve orgasm and __have a fulfilling sex life__ (see 
(Abusharaf, 2001). Melissa Parker (1995) argues that __emotional Western responses to the__ 
__perceived ‘death’ of a female’s sex life are grounded in modern Western notions of__ 
__sexuality as intrinsic to self, and the requirement for particular kinds of sexual__ 
__gratification for well-being, which are not universal. Such notions may seem “immoral,__ 
__amoral or bizarre” to people in some non-Western societies__ (Parker, 1995: 520), and 
__heated debates among Western feminists and researchers are often influenced by Euro-__ 
__American discourses which have little or nothing to do with the study populations__ (ibid.). 
__This “inbuilt colonialism of__ __First World__ __feminism towards the Third”__ (Spivak, 1981:184) 
__makes little attempt to understand that what may be seen as oppressive in one culture, is__ 
__not oppressive in another. Sudanese feminist Rogaia Abusharaf, analysing the work of__ 
__Hosken and others finds that:__ 
__African women are repeatedly painted as downtrodden, forlorn, helpless casualties of__ 
__male dominance. Their confinement in antiquated customs and cultural practices is__ 
__viewed as puissant testimony to their eternal vassalage to patriarchy and,__ 
__consequently, of their subjugation within both the so-called “public” and “private”__ 
__spheres.__ (Abusharaf, 2001:112) 
__These representations stress a notion of patriarchy in which the African woman is seen as__ 
__‘Other’ to Western women, wholly subservient, passive and ‘voiceless’: someone whose__ 
__sexual and reproductive potential is controlled by men and whose genitals are mutilated__ 
__in silence and without protest__ (ibid.). Yet, __in many parts of northern__ __Sudan____, the ritual is__ 
__considered a joyous occasion in a young girl’s life, and is accompanied by ceremonies__ 
__and festivities celebrating the girl’s rite of passage into womanhood__ (Abusharaf, 2000). 
__FGC is often mentioned in conjunction with other forms of ‘gender based__ 
__violence’, which bear no relation to the cultures in which FGC is practiced__. Examples 
include: sati (widow-burning); dowry deaths; prenatal sex selection and female 
infanticide, with the latter two practices grouped alongside FGC by the United Nations 
Population Fund as “extreme manifestations of the low social value placed on girls” 
(UNFPA, 2005). __These classifications of FGC as “violence against women__” (ibid.) 
__exemplify the over-simplifying nature of many rights-based arguments, which pay little__ 
__or no attention to the cultural context in which it takes place – including the fact that the__ 
__practice is usually performed and maintained by women__. Abusharaf (2001) concludes, 
**__Feminism Frontline__** 
after two periods of fieldwork in the Douroshab community in northern Sudan, that 
__women have considerable influence in their community, evident from the roles they play__ 
__in family and community life, and that in the context of FGC, they wield a particular__ 
__power, for they alone perform the operations. She contends that their authority should not__ 
__be attributed to ‘false consciousness’, in which women perpetuate their own subjugation.__ 
__On the contrary, in this context, circumcision is seen as “the machinery which liberates__ 
__the female body from its masculine properties” and for the women she interviewed, it is a__ 
__source of empowerment and strength (Abusharaf, 2001:123).__ 

**13) The state is the centralized agent of social control and defines masculinity as the condition to enter the public sphere** 
Spike V. **__Peterson__**, 19**__92__**, Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, “Gendered States,” p 45-46. [Bhattacharjee] 

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**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**14) Patriarchy describes any power relations- not just male/female** 
Elizabeth **__Boyle__**, Professor of Sociology, Univ. of Minnesota, 20**__02__**, Female Genital Cutting. 


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**15) FGC is only one manifestation of patriarchy-it’s not a cause-patriarchy will still exist in non-FGC communities** 
[[image:file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/serrann/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image018.gif width="396" height="132"]]Ellen **__Gruenbaum__**, Professor of anthropology at the University of California, 20**__01__**, __the Female Circumcision Controversy__. 








**__Feminism Frontline__** 
**16) FGC is the only way African women can feel empowered and unique** 
Máire Ní **__Mhórdha__**, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development 
(MAAPD) Program, January 20**__07__**. “Female genital **cutting**: traditional practice or human rights violation? An exploration of interpretations of FGC and its implications for development in Africa.” http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:msVcbzcLhEkJ:rspas.anu.edu.au/maapd/papers/wp-07-01.pdf+mutilation+cutting+discourse&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us 

//Women constructing other women// 
Janice Boddy (1989), from her research among the Hofriyati of northern Sudan, presents 
the main motivation for FGC as a way to create ‘gendered’ entities in the community. 
__Children are raised genderless and it is not until boys and girls are circumcised that they__ 
__can take on the societal understandings and responsibilities of their gender__. Thus: 
Among Hofriyati, __women actively and ongoingly construct other women… from__ 
__the body of man. By eliminating any vestiges of maleness, they constitute women__ 
__as separate entities and distinct social people.__ (Boddy, 1989:58)